smoothing

We’ve seen a few advances in the finishing processes of 3D prints over the last few months that result in some very attractive parts that look like they were injection molded. Smoothing ABS prints is now a necessary skill for anyone looking to produce professional parts, but those of us using PLA for our RepRaps have been left in the cold. After some experimentation, the guys over at protoparadigm have come up with a way to smooth out those PLA prints, using the same technique and a chemical that’s just as safe as acetone.

Instead of acetone, the guys at protoparadigm are using tetrahydrofuran, or THF, as a solvent for PLA. Other PLA solvents aren’t friendly to living organisms or are somewhat hard to obtain. THF has neither of these qualities; you still need to use it in a well ventilated area with nitrile gloves, but the same precautions when using acetone or MEK still apply. It’s also easy to obtain, as well: you can grab some on Amazon, even.

The process for smoothing PLA prints with THF is the same as smoothing ABS prints with acetone. Just suspend the print in a glass container, pour in a tiny amount of the solvent, and (gently) heat it. The evaporated solvent will smooth all the ridges out of the print, leaving a shiny and smooth surface. You can, of course, hand polish it by dedicating a lint-free cloth and a pair of gloves to the task.

If you’ve ever used an extruding 3D printer, you know that the resulting prints aren’t exactly smooth. At the Southackton hackerspace [James] and [Bracken] worked out a method of smoothing the parts out using vapor. The method involves heating acetone until it forms a vapor, then exposing ABS parts to the vapor. The method only works with ABS, but creates some good looking results.

Acetone is rather flammable, so the guys started out with some safety testing. This involved getting a good air to fuel mixture of acetone, and testing what the worst case scenario would be if it were to ignite. The tests showed that the amount of acetone they used would be rather safe, even if it caught fire, which was a concern several people mentioned last time we saw the method.

After the break, [James] and [Bracken] give a detailed explanation of the process.

[Udo] decided to build a clock using the DCF77 radio module seen above. This of course has been done before: the hardware draws a clock signal from the atomic clock in Braunschweig, Germany. So he grabbed a library for Arduino and got to work. But he was getting rather poor results and upon further investigation realized that the library had been written for 20 Hz modules and his operates at 300 Hz. This means better accuracy but the drawback is that the hardware is more susceptible to noise.

Since the Kinect has become so popular among hackers, [Brad Simpson] over at IDEO Labs finally purchased one for their office and immediately got to tinkering. In about 2-3 hours time, he put together a pretty cool physics demo showing off some of the Kinect’s abilities.

Rather than using rough skeleton measurements like most hacks we have seen, he paid careful attention to the software side of things. Starting off using the Kinect’s full resolution (something not everybody does) [Brad] took the data and manipulated it quite a bit before creating the video embedded below. Skeleton data was collected and run through several iterations of a smoothing algorithm to substantially reduce the noise surrounding the resulting outline.

The final product is quite a bit different than the Kinect videos we are used to seeing, and it drastically improves how the user is able to interact with virtual objects added to the environment. As you may have noticed, the blocks that were added to the video never rarely penetrate the outline of the individual in the movie. This isn’t due to some sort of digital trickery – [Brad] was able to prevent the intersection of different objects via his tweaking of the Kinect data feed.

We’re not sure how much computing power this whole setup requires, but the code is available from their Google Code repository, so we hope to see other projects refined by utilizing the techniques shown off here.